EHR and HIT News for July 30th

Today’s EHR and HIT News includes partnership news between Red River Partners and EXTENSION as well as news from CommonWell Health Alliance that Computer Programs and Systems and Sunquest Information Systems have joined as the newest members of the organization.

Red River Partners With EXTENSION In Healthcare Division Launch

New Hampshire-based Red River, a leading information technology (IT) services provider, announced a partnership today between Red River Healthcare and EXTENSION, INC., developer of a next generation alarm safety platform for healthcare enabling collaborative communication among caregivers and patients. Red River will work with EXTENSION to address these gaps found among clinical staff in healthcare settings, which will ultimately benefit both caregivers and patients.

“EXTENSION is a leader in implementing effective strategies to better the healthcare and IT industry, and we’re proud to work with them,” said Charlie Franco, director of Red River Healthcare. “Together we will address the need for more unified communication between staff and IT systems in the healthcare space. Patients rely on clinical staff to provide them with the best care possible, and our solutions and partnership help prevent miscommunications and eliminate wasted time to make that goal a reality.”

EXTENSION manages the alarms generated by all of the events occurring in a hospital, including nurse call alerts, patient monitoring and STAT order notifications, and EHR tasks, and applies intelligence to provide clinical context to recipients to enable improved event response workflows. EXTENSION’s clinical process experts work with the relevant hospital stakeholders to determine the appropriate solution configurations and provide support to ensure an effective user experience and workflow.

“Red River has consistently been a reliable partner with us on projects in transforming healthcare models for federal clients,” said EXTENSION vice president of product management and marketing, Brian McAlpine. “We are experts in reducing the background noise that crowds busy hospitals and in introducing strategies that reduce communication barriers and improve patient safety. Together with Red River’s IT expertise, we look forward to keeping that partnership strong and delivering advanced communications to healthcare facilities.”

CommonWell Health Alliance Welcomes New Members CPSI and Sunquest to Support and Advance Interoperability Initiatives

CommonWell Health Alliance today announced that Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. (CPSI) and Sunquest Information Systems have joined as the newest members of the organization. They join members Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway Medical Technologies and McKesson and service provider RelayHealth in the Alliance’s work.

CommonWell Health Alliance is a collaborative effort of health information technology suppliers that are focused on achieving interoperability and data liquidity between systems, in compliance with patient authorizations. The Alliance will define, promote and certify a national infrastructure with common platforms and policies. It also will ensure that Health IT products displaying the Alliance seal are certified to work on the national infrastructure.

“We’re glad to be part of CommonWell Health Alliance to achieve data liquidity as a critical foundation for delivering better-coordinated, more-effective care,” said CPSI President and Chief Executive Officer Boyd Douglas. “Our experience as one of the leading providers in electronic health record systems to rural, community and critical access hospitals ensures that this important segment of the health care system is represented in CommonWell’s interoperability efforts.”

CPSI has 34 years of experience in the rural and community hospital setting. The company implements and supports the CPSI EHR System in more than 650 rural and community hospitals across the nation.

“Sunquest is proud to be a member of CommonWell Health Alliance and excited to be part of this movement to achieve interoperability and data liquidity,” said Richard Atkin, President of Sunquest. “Lack of interoperability across laboratories, hospitals and ambulatory offices and difficulty in patient matching during that effort threatens the physical health of our population and impairs the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system.”

Sunquest is the first member of the Alliance that is solely dedicated to health information technology services specific to laboratory and diagnostic facilities; the company works with 37 percent of hospitals in the United States. Today, laboratory results play a significant role in the medical treatments clinicians choose, with more than 70 percent of diagnostic decisions relying on these results.

“We’re excited to have CPSI and Sunquest as the next members of our Alliance,” said Tee Green, president and chief executive officer of Greenway, a founding member of CommonWell. “Health IT providers are best positioned to achieve interoperability by collaborating in ways that can eliminate care inefficiencies and unnecessary costs caused by health data fragmentation. The industry must transform the current segregated and stifled health data landscape into one that creates universal access to relevant consumer information to better coordinate care and improve population health.”

CPSI and Sunquest join the Alliance on the heels of CommonWell’s latest member summit last week, where member companies continued to establish its governance structure, IT standards, develop its services and plan its upcoming 2013 pilot program. More information on these efforts will be made available within the coming months.